As is my annual tradition, I present here a list of the books I read in the just-ended calendar year (2008). Not included are the five titles I put down, unfinished for one reason or another. The list is sorted alphabetically, by author. Particularly noteworthy ones are highlighted in yellow.

The Prodigal Tongue, by Mark Abley

Alentejo Blue, by Monica Ali

Koba the Dread, by Martin Amis

If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin

Frederick Street, by Maude Barlow and Elizabeth May

Hotel Bemelmans, by Ludwid Bemelmans

Meat: A Love Story, by Susan Bourette

Talk Talk, by T.C. Boyle

The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez, by Jimmy Breslin

The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke

Age of Iron, by J.M. Coetzee

Boyhood, by J.M. Coetzee

Running in Place; Scenes from the South of France, by Nicholas Delbanco

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, By Guy Delisle

Hello to All That; by John Falk

On Truth, by Harry G. Frankfurt

The Ancient Tea Horse Road, by Jeff Fuchs

100 Myths About the Middle East, by Fred Halliday

The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway

Seven Openings of the Head, by Liane Keightley

Peanutbutter & Jeremy’s Best Book Ever, by James Kochalka

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Heroes, by Joe McGinness

Twenty Six, by Leo McKay Jr.

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, by James Meek

Starting Out in the Evening, by Brian Morton

Paul Moves Out, by Michel Rabagliati

Paul Goes Fishing, by Michel Rabagliati

Clyde Fans, by Seth

Toast, by Nigel Slater

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates

Rat, by Andrzej Zaniewski

That’s 35 books, down from last year’s all-time high of 38. Some, of course, were just silly (the Peanutbutter & Jeremy book is basically a collection of cartoons for kids, but at 276 pages, it qualifies as a “book”). I enjoyed them all, although some stood out more than the others.

The statistical breakdown is as follows:

31 books written by men, four written by women. I’m not sure why so few women made my list this year.

Five books of a “graphical” nature (graphic novels, or “cartoons”).

19 books categorized as fiction, and 16 as non-fiction. These are very slippery categories, as many works are a mixture of both. For example, Leo McKay’s Twenty Six is a fictionalized account of an actual mining disaster. Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee reads like fiction, but is categorized as memoir. The “Paul” graphic novels by Michel Rabagliati are taken very much from his own life experiences, but are considered fiction.

Nine “memoirs” (one of my favorite categories). This too is a slippery category. For example, I consider Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread a memoir because it is as much about Amis and his conversations about Stalin as it is about Stalin itself. (And ultimately, isn’t everything that Martin Amis writes really about Martin Amis?) Another way to categorize it would be “impressionistic biography” but I’m not sure Amazon has listings for that. Then there’s the already mentioned categorization problem with the excellent Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee, plus The Ancient Tea Horse Road, by Jeff Fuchs is as much a memoir as it is a travel and adventure book and a reference for tea lore.

The find of the year, however, goes to Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I already wrote about it here, but I think it deserves another shout-out. As you probably know, the film version is currently playing in the cinemas, although I wonder if the cinematic medium will succeed in capturing the tension and the feel of the slowly twisting knife in the gut that Yates brings out in his crisp and piercing writing style. This is one of those books that you read as much — or more — for the writing itself as for the story and characters.

Postscript: the archivist/knowledge manager in me feels compelled to link to my reading lists from previous years, so here they are for 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

Well, your list is short, but that doesn’t make it lame. And it’s not like you had a quiet and relaxing year with lots of down time!

BTW I had to laugh when I read that claim that Bush read 100 books this year. As if! Maybe he looked at 100 books, but there’s no way he read them all. Mind you, he might have taken up reading as a way to pass the time while Cheney was running the country (into the ground).